Militia est vita nostra declared Job (at least in the Vulgate version of the Bible): “Our life is a constant battle.” In a similar vein, St. Augustine declared that the need for the virtue of courage is clear testimony to the reality of evil in the world. These are strong words from the past. They put us on notice and alert. One suspects that the most famous Augustinian in the world today, Pope Leo XIV, would have read and pondered them at some point. We know that he is worried about the impact of AI and is taking the time to write an encyclical on it. In this, he joins papal predecessors who worried and warned about technological threats to humanity and our humanity.
Benedict XVI coined a phrase—“secular culture”—to capture a global threat to our humanity. In it, technological rationality is deemed the highest version of reason. In truth, however, it distorts its objects and cuts humanity off from the deepest wells of spiritual and moral wisdom. Turned toward nature, it fails to listen to the logos in creation; turned toward man, it denies his God-given dignity and reduces him to manipulable matter. Similarly, Pope Francis wrote about—and excoriated—what he called “the technological mentality” that reduces creation and human beings to resources and commodities.
As these two examples indicate, as technology “advances,” so too must the Church’s social teaching, a combination of principles and discernment of the times.
A multifaceted assault
However, having raised the specter of threats to humanity, I find that one major threat, at once ominous and pressing, is conspicuous by its absence in recent papal concerns and utterances. By “recent,” I mean the newly installed occupant of St. Peter’s throne and his immediate predecessor. This absence is highlighted by the fact that their immediate predecessor, Benedict XVI, spoke regularly about this threat, in his own way and idiom, to be sure.
To put matters directly: a truly dire threat to humanity today is the multifaceted assault on Western civilization that confronts us at every turn. Absent the visible example of Western civilization, however, the rest of humanity will remain mired in its deplorable ignorance and half-truths about man. Western civilization is the civilizational order in which the humanity of man has been most explored, extolled, and realized (if imperfectly, as such things must be). If it were to leave the stage of history, both as ideal and as reality, humanity would be immeasurably diminished.
These days, however, it has countless enemies who put it directly in their sights. While their name is legion, a majority tend to arrange themselves in two very broad categories: the ongoing migration into Europe1 (including the UK2) and elsewhere in the West by non-Western human beings and groups, often Muslim,3 predominantly tribal, whose worldviews, cultures, and practices are diametrically opposed to those of the West; who in turn are encouraged, aided, and abetted by political and cultural elites, typically on the port side of the ideological spectrum, who welcome them in furtherance of their own project of dismantling (“deconstructing”) the West in its characteristic features and achievements. The latter include the Christian religion, modern liberal democracy, the rule of law, national identities, respect for individual conscience, and the equal dignity of women. These mainly leftwing elites claim to rule in the name of “Multiculturalism,” “Democracy,” and “Humanity,” but these talismanic terms are understood in decidedly anti-liberal democratic and anti-Western ways and are enforced by a panoply of nefarious means, including authoritarian suppression of speech and bald-faced lying. For them, Slavery is freedom, and falsehood is Truth.
These are sweeping claims, of course. And certainly harsh as well. They omit Western misdeeds and the many exceptions among migrants who are well-disposed to the West, as well as dissident members among Western elites. They come from “a bird’s-eye point of view” and speak in generalities and broad tendencies. Complexities and qualifications are left out. Still, as the French political philosopher Pierre Manent has said, les choses politiques arrivent en gros, political things show up in large letters, and the informed citizen can see and read them well enough.
Moreover, that they are not “politically correct,” especially concerning Islam as a religion, is itself significant because it reveals the elite-enforced prejudices of the day. Therefore, having acknowledged the foregoing limitations, I proceed to expound my broad claims. To do so, I need to sketch what Western civilization is, indicating why it is worth defending, say more about the main threats confronting it today, and why the Church and Christians should engage in this gigantomachia.
A tall order, it will take two installments.
Given the current Church leadership in the West, I fear that this necessary defense of the West will be more a matter of the laity than of clerics. The examples of Cardinal Sarah and Benedict XVI indicate that this does not have to be the case, however.
Quid sit Occidens?
Leo Strauss, the Jewish Platonist, famously said that Western civilization has two “roots,” the Hebrew Bible and Greek philosophy. Each articulated an estimable configuration of the human soul: the first an attitude of pious obedience to divine Law, the second the pride of the independent mind, bent on questioning authoritative nomoi and seeking the truth of nature and man on its own, or in dialogue with others. Modernity, understood as “Progress,” had set itself resolutely against both original components of the West.
The remarkably erudite French Catholic polymath Rémi Brague contributed to Strauss’s picture of a conflict between these ancient portraits of man and “modernity” by adding “Roman” elements to the mix.4 Long before modernity, pagan Romans such as Cicero and Virgil had creatively adopted Greek thought and humanism, and Christians in the Roman Empire, while acknowledging an eternal debt to Judaism, also said that they–or their Lord—had brought Judaism to its divinely ordained completion. These “imperial” Christians took on the task of synthesizing these secular and religious elements. “Rome” so understood became the matrix and model for a new cultural formation in the West, Europe. Charlemagne, the Frankish king who taught himself to read and had Augustine’s City of God as his livre de chevet, and the polyglot Roger Bacon were two emblematic figures of this European synthesis.
Benedict XVI, as Cardinal and Pope, spoke regularly about the West and Europe. Perhaps most famously, he did so in his 2006 Regensburg Address. In it, he presented Europe as the divinely ordained encounter—God’s design and will – of the new religion of the Incarnate Logos and Hellenistic culture, the culture of the Greeks that had developed the distinct human capacity of logos in multiple ways, including philosophia, the search for the truth about God, the world, and the human. According to Benedict, this encounter of two cultivations of logos, divine and human, was required for the perfection of both, and gave Europe as a “cultural continent” both world-historical significance and a providential privilege. While he did not equate the Church with Europe, Benedict did indicate that the loss of Europe as a cultural formation and set of practices would be a disaster for the Church and for humanity.
Already, we can begin to understand what would be lost if the West, especially in its European form, were to disappear: the dialogue and mutual enrichment of Christian faith and philosophical reason. Without this union, faith loses the discerning monitoring of reason’s pronouncements, including warnings against the violation of the law of contradiction. If Christian faith is to be the faith of the Incarnate Logos, it cannot “speak against” itself and remain true to itself. Under the previous pontificate, we were informed that “in theology, 2 & 2 can equal 5.” This sort of thinking (sic) is the death of Christianity as a “λογικὴν λατρείαν” (Rom 12:1), a reasonable worship.
Benedict on Islam
Benedict’s insistence on the “logical” nature of Christianity, and his articulation of Europe as a unique cultural endeavor combining the two logoi, led him to raise the same set of questions vis-à-vis Islam. How does it stand with respect to logos? Is Allah supreme Reason or, rather, Supreme Will? Does human reason have its rights vis-à-vis religion? Does God—the true God—legitimate, even command, violence?
In the era after 9-11, these were urgent questions to ask and address.
Since then, subsequent events in Europe and elsewhere, including tens of thousands of exponentially increasing Islamist terrorist attacks and the continued influx of migrants, many illegally, from Muslim countries,5 make it even more pertinent and urgent today.
At this point, with twenty more years of evidence in hand, one must ask if Islam, with its commitment to Shari’a law and its fundamental view of humanity as divided between a “house of submission” and a “house of war,” is compatible with the Christian West in its liberal iteration? Weighing against an affirmative answer is the intractable fact that, according to the self-understanding of Islam, moving to a non-Muslim country is equivalent to entering into territory hostile to Allah, with a religious duty of conquest. With the Ummah comes a foreign army with its own legal system.
History has demonstrated this beyond dispute.
Robert Louis Wilken on Islam
About the same time as Benedict XVI, the famous historian of Christianity, Robert Louis Wilken, wrote a short pamphlet on “Christianity Face to Face with Islam”. In it, he sketched the dramatic history of the relations between Christianity and Islam, between Christian countries and the Ummah. It is not a pretty sight. A catena of passages can present the broad outlines of his report.
Within the space of a century, the movement inaugurated by the prophet Muhammad had planted a permanent political and religious rival to Christianity in historic Christian lands. Its advance both to the West and to the East meant that a large part of the globe was claimed for Islam, fulfilling the words of the Qur’an … For Christians these territories proved irrecoverable.
A great contrast characterizes the two:
Most of the territories that were Christian in the year 700 are now Muslim. Nothing similar has happened to Islam. Christianly seems like a rain shower that soaks the earth and then moves on, whereas Islam appears more like a great lake that constantly overflows its banks to inundate new territory. When Islam arrives, it comes to stay – unless displaced by force, as it was in Spain.
Within this broader history,
Europe has a special place. Indeed, Europe’s place in Christian history is singular and without parallel. Rome, the most hallowed city in Western Christianity, was the home of a Christian community at the beginning, as St. Paul’s letter to the Church in Rome attests. Centuries later, in alliance with Rome, Christians north of the Alps created Europe and, in modern times, European Christians and their descendants carried the faith to all parts of the world.
In continental Europe itself, “Christianity has had an abiding physical presence”. This is important because of the kind of beings we are and the nature of the Christian faith. “The bonds of affection are attached to place: [Europe’s] churches, shrines, tombs and pilgrimage sites are imprinted deeply on the Christian soul.” And in that soul, “memory is an integral part of Christian faith.” In his own way, Wilken, the Church historian and Christian psychologist, echoes the theologian, Benedict, concerning the constitutive place that Europe plays in the life and constitution of the Church.
Therefore,
[t]he demise of Christianity in Europe and the ascendancy of Islam would be a crippling blow to the continuity of Christian memory and the sense that the Church is the carrier of an ancient, unbroken living tradition that reaches back through time to the apostles and to Jesus.
“A crippling blow”! The point bears repeating:
If Christianity continues to decline in Europe and becomes a minority religion, its history will appear fragmentary and episodic and its claims to universality further diminished by the shifting patterns of geography.
Writing in 2010, Wilken noted that
with each passing decade Islam … penetrates more deeply into Christian societies, and, by its fixed and impermeable tenancy of a large part of the globe, circumscribes the practice of Christianity.
Confronting the ongoing incursions of Islam and the insouciance (and worse) of European leaders, the Christian historian instinctively turned to the past:
At the end of After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre wrote that we are waiting for another St. Benedict. In my wanton and admittedly darker ruminations, I sometimes wonder whether what Christianity needs is not so much a new Benedict as a new Charlemagne.
In other words, he longed for a more historically aware and muscular Christianity than that which was typically on offer (and which only became worse under Francis)
At the end of the eleventh-century Song of Roland, which recalled and celebrated the Battle of Roncevaux Pass in 778, a victorious Charlemagne acknowledges that while he has won the battle, the war with “the Saracens” would perforce continue. “God,” he cried, “how full of toil is my life!” Militia est vita nostra.
“A Heritage with an Obligation for Christians”
The Regensburg Address was not the first time that Benedict spoke of Europe. In 1979, he gave a substantive lecture entitled “Europe: A Heritage with an Obligation for Christians.” The title is already arresting. Europe is a heritage, a heritage for Christians (primarily but not solely for European Christians), a heritage that conveys an obligation as well. Based on what we saw in the Regensburg Address, we can already surmise, at least to some extent, what and why this obligation is. Christians, to be Christian, must be men and women of faith and of reason, of an ample reason of the sort practiced and articulated by the Greeks and the Church Fathers, and not just modern technological rationality.
In this lecture, however, Ratzinger goes well beyond the discussion of the Regensburg Address, adding other essential elements to the concept of the West and Europe. He also provides a longer discussion of Islam.
He identifies four “strata” that, cumulatively, constitute the history and complex identity of Europe. While each has its “ambivalences,” he speaks primarily of their positive contributions. (In this essay, I follow his lead.) The first is the ancient Greek contribution, “the Greek heritage,” which includes but goes beyond the cultivation of philosophical logos we saw above. After invoking Plato’s Socrates, Ratzinger focuses especially on the discovery of democracy by the Greeks, whose more thoughtful proponents recognized that democracy must be based upon shared communal values and subordinated to eunomia—a moral law that guides and measures democratic majorities. This is a permanent lesson for all democratic communities and governments.
Next is the Christian contribution. Here, Cardinal Ratzinger anticipates the point he will make in the Regensburg Address—“Christianity, accordingly, is the synthesis brought about in Jesus Christ between Israel’s faith and the Greek mind”–but does so by way of richer Scriptural exegesis than he provides in the later lecture. He connects events in St. John’s Gospel–the request of Greeks to see Jesus during Holy Week (Jn 12:21)–with two passages in Acts: Acts 1: 8, where the path of the Good News goes from Jerusalem to Rome, “a pathway to the pagans by whom Jerusalem is destroyed and who nevertheless adopt it in a new way,” and Acts 16: 6-10, where “the Spirit of Jesus” forbids Paul to confine his ministry to Asia, but “a Macedonian appears to him in a vision … and calls to him: “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” “Europe,” Ratzinger concludes, “is based on this synthesis.”
Two more elements or strata remain: the medieval–what Ratzinger calls “the Latin heritage”–and the modern, it too styled a “heritage.” While the former cannot be reproduced–“the medieval res publica christiana cannot be restored”, because “history cannot be turned back”–core elements can and should be retained or restored. Ratzinger, citing an earlier scholar (H. Gollwitzer), singles out its “legal systems, which transcended tribes and nations,” “the institutions of its universities,” “the founding and spread of its religious orders,” and “the circulation of its intellectual and ecclesial life through Rome as the ventricle of its heart.” He leaves it to his listeners and readers to imagine and do the work of contemporary application and updating.
In general, the official Church (“Rome”) and Christians, lay and religious, are charged with inspiring legal, educational, and religious developments that form a culture that respects human dignity. This dignity consists in being the image of the Creator God, the One who created by way of speech-acts, hence the creature conversant in the dual logoi of reason and Revelation and endowed with the faculty of conscience. (Ratzinger elsewhere characterizes conscience as the “window” to “being” and the “ears” that allow one to hear God’s voice in the inner sanctuary of the heart.) The Cardinal and Pope was always concerned with the cultural foundations of law and political life and taught that premodern Europe’s view of man, of the human person, male and female, was a unique synthesis and achievement, one to cherish and reaffirm, if also to develop and refine.
At its best, the modern era was one such development. Indeed, Ratzinger speaks of “the indispensable contribution made by the spirit of the modern era.” In particular, he singles out one modern development, one that is “the characteristic feature” of modernity, and is especially dear to his heart. The passage merits citation in full. From the outset, he puts his personal stamp on the point.
I consider it to be the characteristic feature of the modern era, in the positive sense, that the separation of faith and law, which in the medieval res publica christiana was rather hidden, is now carried out consistently; as a consequence, freedom of religion gradually and clearly takes shape in a variety of bourgeois legal systems, and, thus, the interior claims of the faith are distinguished from the fundamental claims of the ethos upon which the law is based. The human values that are fundamental for the Christian world view make it possible, in a productive dualism of Church and state, to have a free, humane society in which freedom of conscience and, with it, fundamental human rights are secured. In this society, different expressions of the Christian faith can coexist and make room for different political positions, which nevertheless have in common a central set of standard values, the binding force of which simultaneously safeguards a maximum of freedom.
Here, the theologian, whose fundamental categories for analyzing society are “culture” and “history”, employs an interpretive lens that he later made famous in connection with the disputes over the Second Vatican Council, a hermeneutics of continuity. It was Christianity that had revealed to the world–to the pagan world–that the human person had rights that the state must respect, that the state’s authority was not absolute. Nonetheless, it did have an important role to play in human life, indeed a divinely ordained one (Rom 13:1-7). Fast forward sixteen centuries: one could say that in the breakdown of Christianity at the Reformation, Providence had given both followers and secular opponents the need and opportunity to retrieve this original Christian teaching. As Augustine famously taught, God can write straight with crooked lines.
Now, Ratzinger was fully aware that such a view of modernity was an “idealized” picture, one never fully realized, and that since the 1960s was under attack by partisans of advanced modernity, of a “modernity without restraint,” to employ Eric Voegelin’s resonant phrase. He developed the concept of “secular culture” to capture and critique it. In the second part of this essay, when we turn to the secular enemies of the West, we will rehearse what he said.
Here, however, the foregoing can stand as a statement of what he considered to be the chief among the contributions of the modern era to the European idea. As he often argued, however, while a genuine development, it had its vital “roots” in Christianity. Absent them, it would wither.
Benedict on Islam II
In this lengthy discourse on Europe, Islam features quite importantly. Without going into the details that Wilken does, Ratzinger concurs that “[f]rom the end of antiquity until well into the early modern era, Islam proved to be the real counterpart to Europe.” His treatment of the proper relations between and among the democratic state, the Church, law, the moral order, and culture was, in part, articulated to provide a point of contrast with this perennial counterpart. Where Christianity put separations in reciprocal dependency and collaboration, Islam maintained pagan wholeness.
Thus, after speaking of the inability of the Islamic world to effect in a lasting manner “the rapprochement between Islam and the intellectual world of Greece,” he draws the inference that “[a]bove all, this means that the separation of faith and law, of religion and tribal authority, was not completed in Islam and cannot be accomplished without disturbing Islam at the very core.”
The point is so important that he repeats it:
Put differently: the faith is presented in the form of a more or less archaic system of civil and penal laws and corresponding practices in everyday life. This is so decisive (involving “the very core” of Islam), that Islam is defined, not in terms of nationality but, rather, by a legal system that fixes its ethnic and cultural features and at the same time sets limits to rationality where the Christian synthesis sees that reason has its place.
As I would render (more pointedly) the thought: when Muslims come to a Western country, insofar as they follow their religion, they establish an imperium in imperio, one that in its core norms and internal dynamism is “fixed” and is antithetical to Western limited government, independent civil society, and the rights of all—especially, but not solely, women. Moreover, because of Islam’s founding division of humanity into two houses, they are duty-bound to look for ways to submit the host country to Allah and Shari’a. The persecution and dhimmitude of non-Muslims in Muslim-run countries make clear the future it necessarily contains.
This is what the West has let into its bosom. What, one must ask, can account for this sort of suicidal civilizational madness?
Endnotes:
1 “The EU’s foreign-born population has grown steadily from around 41 million in 2010 to over 63 million in 2024, representing an increase from 10% to 14.1% of the total EU population.” (“The Immigrant Population in the European Union”, April 4, 2025).
2 With a dramatic spike in attempted illegal immigrants. “In the year ending March 2025, there were 44,125 detected irregular arrivals, 14% more than in the previous year, and 86% of these arrived on small boats.” (“How many people come to the UK irregularly?”, June 25, 2025).
3 “The ethnic map of Europe is changing. Estimates vary, but it is generally accepted that some 25 million Muslims live today in the 28 EU member states. Declining fertility rates across Europe are intertwined with the question of migration. For instance, since 2008 when 4.68 million children were born, the total fertility rate in Europe has been below the replacement rate, with 1.46 live births per woman registered in the EU in 2022, roughly a million fewer births than in 2008. By comparison, in 1960, Europe’s birthrates stood at close to 7 million per year. Against those EU averages, one analysis of current trends conducted by Pew Research Center in 2017 showed that a Muslim woman in Europe had on average 2.6 children, a full child more than an average non-Muslim woman that year. Today the largest Muslim populations in Europe center in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Belgium and Sweden, where the question of how to integrate those communities remains front and center in those countries’ politics.” (“Migration is Remaking Europe: Is There a Workable Path Forward for the Continent?”, September 17, 2024).
4 He did so in Eccentric Culture: A Theory of Western Civilization (in the French original: Europe, la voie romaine).
5 “Europe’s Growing Muslim Population” (Nov 29, 2017). Note that this account dates from 2017. For some responses to this growth, see this Wikipedia entry.
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Thank you! Looking forward to the next installment! We lost an absolute giant when we lost Benedict XVI, and while some terrific books are being published on his legacy (“The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Ratzinger”, “Joseph Ratzinger in Dialogue with Philosophical Traditions” and more) it pains me that that his work and that of John Paul II was systematically erased during the previous papacy (yes, occasionally quoted, but astonishingly often with the opposite meaning of what these great popes intended, or otherwise so far out of context as to be a meaningless nod in their direction. In the case of the saint, his Institutes on Marriage and the Family (except for the one in Washington DC) were either shuttered or gutted, that is, filled with people who objected to his work and do not teach what he taught). Things are not much better now. In our local diocesan communications all we ever hear about is study groups on the “legacy” of Bergoglio….
Paul Seaton asks: “This [Islam] is what the West has let into its bosom. What, one must ask, can account for this sort of suicidal civilizational madness?”
Three points:
FIRST, Islam imposes a distant, totally inscrutable, and arbitrary Allah (as opposed to the Self-disclosing and not-unreasonable Triune One), and is an accident of history writ large. Might never have happened at all except for the real power vacuum that resulted in early 7th-century Arabia after Byzantium and Persia had exhausted each other in several decades of conflict…
SECOND, then enters one more of history’s thousands of Arabian prophets who, this time, consolidates the warring tribes and orients them outward. A folk hero phenomenon armed with intuitions from on high and which, after his death, were gathered into the Qur’an—believed to be the very essence of God. And, cemented into untouchability by the caliph in Baghdad in A.D. 847 when the Mu’tazilite faction was finally suppressed (whose fledgling notion was that the “dictations” in Arabic might be partly allegorical, that is, that the polyglot Qur’an originated in time rather than in eternity…).
THIRD, so, today, a resurgent population of now 1.8 billion Muslims. Hints at a fraternal dialogue with the Grand Imam Ahmad Al-Tayyeb of Al-Azhar University were penciled-in in recent years (Fratelli Tutti, 2000), and the Grand Imam is said to have a following of 150 million. But this is only one-tenth of the sectarian and fractious Muslim population. Meanwhile, in the West, a post-Enlightenment and spiritual/cultural vacuum—not unlike the earlier vacuum noted above. Such that the very limited contact point of “fraternity” begs the question of whether fraternal co-existence can long substitute for what the West—formerly a cultural event and more than a geography—has understood as the inborn, personal/universal Natural Law involving moral absolutes that are timeless (a topic for another day…).
SUMMARY: In short, the answer to Seaton’s question (above) is this: radical Secularism takes the incarnational and Triune One out of the public forum, while radical Islam takes the public forum out of submissive Man. The perfect storm.
https://whatweneednow.substack.com/p/the-two-hands-of-god?publication_id=1509432&utm_campaign=email-post-title&r=pc6wu&utm_medium=email
It is important to note that Western Civilization, is under attack because The Blessed Trinity, God, Who Is In Essence, The Communion Of Perfect Divine Eternal Love, In The Unity Of The Holy Ghost, Is under attack. This is how we know the synod is merely an attempt to deny The Lord And Giver Of Life, and thus deny that affirming The Sanctity And Dignity Of The Marital Act Within The Sacrament Of Holy Matrimony affirms God’s Intention For Respect For The Sanctity And Dignity Of All Human Life From The Moment Of Conception To Death. A Catholic synod, like all things Catholic, affirms The Deposit Of Faith, and thus affirms Sacred Tradition, Sacred Scripture, and The Teaching Of The Magisterium, Grounded In The Word Of Perfect Divine Eternal Love Incarnate, Our Savior, Jesus The Christ.
We can know through both Faith and reason grounded in The Deposit Of Faith, that “Salvation is of The Jews”, From The Father, Through, With, And In His Only Begotten Son, Jesus The Christ, In The Unity Of The Holy Ghost, The Spirit Of Perfect Divine Eternal Love Between The Father And His Only Begotten Son, Jesus The Christ, Who Proceeds From The Father And His Only Begotten Son, Jesus The Christ, thus all heresy, including the heresy of modernism, is rooted in a denial of The Spirit Of Perfect Divine Eternal Love Between The Father and His Only Begotten Son, Who Proceeds From Both The Father And His Only Begotten Son, Jesus The Christ, And Thus, In Denying The Unity Of The Holy Ghost, Heresy will eventually lead to apostasy.
Let the counterfeit magisterium be Charitably Anathema!
The fact. that a synod that denies The Deposit Of Faith that Christ Has Entrusted To His One, Holy, Catholic, And Apostolic Church For The Salvation Of Souls, and thus denies that which every Catholic must believe with Divine And Catholic Faith (Catholic Canon 750) has been permitted to subsist within The Catholic Church without receiving The Charitable Anathema Instituted By Christ Himself, when He Stated, “You cannot be My Disciples if you do not Abide In My Word”, is evidence enough that a counterfeit magisterium that denies The Word Of God, Jesus The Christ, Is Divine, and thus denies that Our Call To Holiness Is A Call To Be “Temples Of The Holy Ghost”, The Spirit Of Perfect Divine Eternal Love Between The Father And His Only Begotten Son, Who Proceeds From The Spirit Of Perfect Divine Eternal Love Between The Father And The Son, is evidence enough that through some false ecumenical fissure, a spirit that denies The Unity Of The Holy Ghost, The Lord And Giver Of Life, and thus denies The Sanctity And Dignity Of Human Life from the moment of conception to death, exists and is attempting to subsist within The One Body Of Christ.
“Penance, Penance, Penance.”
At the heart of Liberty Is Christ, “4For it is impossible for those who were once illuminated, have tasted also the heavenly gift and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost, 5Have moreover tasted the good word of God and the powers of the world to come…”, to not believe that Christ’s Sacrifice On The Cross will lead us to Salvation, but we must desire forgiveness for our sins, and accept Salvational Love, God’s Gift Of Grace And Mercy; believe in The Power And The Glory Of Salvation Love, and rejoice in the fact that No Greater Love Is There Than This, To Desire Salvation For One’s Beloved.
“Hail The Cross, Our Only Hope.”
“Blessed are they who are Called to The Marriage Supper Of The Lamb.”
“For where your treasure is there will your heart be also.”
Pray that Our Blessed Mother’s Immaculate Heart Will Triumph soon!
https://crisismagazine.com/opinion/benedict-defends-traditional-family-in-christmas-address-to-roman-curia
This is what the West has let into its bosom. What, one must ask, can account for this sort of suicidal civilizational madness? (Paul Seaton).
A keen scholar of cultures and the imposture of the Muslim as a Western friendly pilgrim. Islam antithetical in every dimension to the imperial Christian that sought to synthesize Christ’s revelation with Roman order.
Stupidity, pretentious religiosity, progressive arrogance is largely responsible for Europe, not simply the antiChristian EU, but the Church itself foisting a suicidal immigration policy of open borders, depredation of national cultural interests.
A false humanity based on misguided interpretation of the words of Christ are largely responsible, advocated by Francis I in communion with George Soros, Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates et Al. Out of the political blue the previously unlikely leader for a return to a Christian world order is the pariah Donald Trump. Much likewise depends on what direction admittedly Francis I advocate Leo XIV takes the Church and world.
The circular self-validation of the sola-Scriptura Qur’an almost reminds us of the circular self-validation of Western “process theology” as in a so-called Synod on Synodality. The process is the message…
St. Paul noticed that even authentic Christianity might be accused of such circular self-validation, except for an historical event testified by witnesses: “If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our [circular] preaching is useless and so is your faith (1 Cor 15:13-14).
It is important to note, a True Follower Of Jesus The Christ, The Word Of Perfect Divine Eternal Love Incarnate, would respect, defend, secure, and thus affirm , The Sanctity of the marital act within The Sacrament of Holy Matrimony, and thus affirm God’s intention that we respect, defend, secure, and thus affirm the inherent Sanctity and Dignity of all Human Life.
“IAM Alpha And Omega, The First And The Last, The Beginning And The End.” ✝️
https://biblehub.com/drb/revelation/22.htm
Circular as in complete, thus we can know through both Faith and Reason, that the so called spirit of the synod on synods, is not of The Holy Ghost, and those who claim it is, are not following The Christ.
There is no hope for Western civilization and culture.
#1. The predominant culture is atheistic.
#2. The vast majority know nothing of their historical patrimony
#3. The vast majority are of the mind that Islam is a religion of peace and not of conquest.
4. What’s left of Christianity is nothing more than a shell of professed beliefs and practices.
The only thing left to do is take wagers when the last nail will be driven into its coffin.
DR: At this point in time it appears you are correct, except for point 4. Point 4 applies to mainstream protestants. There is some hope in the Catholic Church, the only problem is the hierarchy seems too PC and wimpy to push back.
GRM: I agree. I think there is hope for the future if it were up to the laity of the Church in some small quarters. However, the hierarchy keeps on getting in the way. Truth would be a powerful force in the world were it not for far too many feckless and homosexual-sympathizing bishops.
What, one must ask, can account for this sort of suicidal civilizational madness?
In his defence of the natural law, C S Lewis writes in The Abolition of Man ‘without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism.
The west has allows men without chests to make the long march into all the institutions, with Islam hot on their heels to fill the religious vacuum.
Cloying mawkish empathy facilitates the west losing its head and its soul.
It does seem that the Swamp and woke FBI/CIA were trying to paint up Catholics as the internally divided extremists. The CIA is composed of many backgrounds so it became clear from the bias demonstrated which backgrounds had taken charge in there.
Where is Trump going to come down on this. The thing has a life of its own so far and this is what would have to be delineated.
Let us not forget it was Mr. Biden’s CIA,/ FBI that desired to persecute The Body Of Christ , which consists of The Faithful. The question is, when will the counterfeit magisterium that consists of those who desire to persecute The Body Of Christ be Charitably Anathema for The Salvation Of Souls?
Thank you for this very clarifying essay and for dividing it into two parts.
Cleo, you’re more than welcome. Carl Olsen should be given props for letting me divide the essay into two.
This is a stimulating essay and I appreciate its attention to Benedict XVI’s great interventions, especially Regensburg and the Paris lecture. Still, I wonder if the picture risks narrowing Catholic social thought to only two axes—logos (natural law) and liberty of conscience—while omitting the third: justice in the socioeconomic order. Benedict himself, in Caritas in veritate, insisted that a society without truth and justice in its economic structures undermines its own humanity. John Paul II made similar points in Centesimus annus, and Francis has carried this forward with his critique of an “economy that kills.”
If this third pillar is left out, the Church’s witness risks becoming a civilizational apologetic rather than the integral defence of the human person that the magisterium has always sought.
As a personal observation, I also note that Pope Leo XIV—who is evoked here—has cited Francis 76 times in his first hundred days, Augustine 52 times (38% of pronouncements), John Paul II 18 times (13%), Benedict XVI 10 times (7%). These proportions suggest not a rupture but a deliberate breadth of reference. The selective memory of certain commentators sometimes obscures this richer balance.
Heresy is what heresy does, it denies The Spirit Of Perfect Divine Eternal Love Between The Father And His Only Begotten Son, Jesus The Christ, and in creating a god in one’s own image, will render onto Caesar or oneself, what belongs to God, The Blessed Trinity.
For example:
“If there is a union of a private nature, there is neither a third party, nor is society affected.”- Jorge Bergoglio, as a cardinal, denying sin done in private is sin, denying The Sanctity of the marital act within The Sacrament of Holy Matrimony, and thus God’s intention that we respect the inherent Dignity of all Human Life, and that we affirm that we, who are Baptized Catholic, are Called to be, “Temples of The Holy Ghost”. (God’s Universal Call To Holiness). To make it appear as if it is Loving and Merciful to desire that we or our Beloved remain in our sin, and not desire to overcome our sinful inclinations and become transformed by accepting Salvational Love, God’s Gift of Grace and Mercy, is blasphemy, that if we have allowed our hearts to be so hardened, at the hour of our death, will keep us from obtaining Salvation. If it were true that it is Loving and Merciful that we desire that we or our beloved remain in our sin and not desire to overcome our disordered inclination , and become transformed through Salvational Love, God’s Gift of Grace and Mercy, we would have no need for our only Savior, Jesus The Christ.
Furthermore, CCC 1849 “Sin is an offense against reason, truth, and right conscience; it is failure in genuine love for God and neighbor caused by a perverse attachment to certain goods. It wounds the nature of man and injures human solidarity. “.
You can only have a Great Apostasy from The True Church of Christ, Christ’s One, Holy, Catholic, And Apostolic Church, Through The Unity of The Holy Ghost(Filioque). “For The Holy Spirit was not promised to the successors of Peter that by His revelation they might make known new doctrine, but that by His assistance they might inviolably keep and faithfully expound the Revelation, the Deposit of Faith, delivered through the Apostles.”
Only those are to be included as members of the Church who have been Baptized and profess The True Faith, and who have not been so unfortunate as to separate themselves from the Unity of the Body, or been excluded by legitimate authority for grave faults committed. (Mystici Coporis 22).
Let no man deceive you, this statement in every way, shape, and form is a statement of heresy which can only beget heresy:
“If there is a union of a private nature, there is neither a third party, (No Holy Ghost), nor is society affected. Now, if the union is given the category of marriage, there could be children affected. Every person needs a male father and a female mother that can help shape their identity.”- Jorge Bergoglio statement manifest before his invalid election to the Papacy demonstrating Jorge Bergoglio’s “refusal of submission to the supreme pontiff or of communion with the members of the Church subject to him“, was evident, prior to his election to the Papacy, and that is all you need to know to recognize that the election of a schismatic to the Papacy is not valid based upon both The Deposit Of Faith and Canon Law.
CCC 1849 “Sin is an offense against reason, truth, and right conscience; it is failure in genuine love for God and neighbor caused by a perverse attachment to certain goods. It wounds the nature of man and injures human solidarity. “
Code of Canon Law(Latin Church)
“Canon 750 1. Those things are to be believed by divine and catholic faith which are contained in the word of God as it has been written or handed down by tradition, that is, in the single deposit of faith entrusted to the Church, and which are at the same time proposed as divinely revealed either by the solemn Magisterium of the Church, or by its ordinary and universal Magisterium, which in fact is manifested by the common adherence of Christ’s faithful under the guidance of the sacred Magisterium. All are therefore bound to avoid any contrary doctrines. 2. Furthermore, each and everything set forth definitively by the Magisterium of the Church regarding teaching on faith and morals must be firmly accepted and held; namely those things required for the holy keeping and faithful exposition of the deposit of faith; therefore, anyone who rejects propositions which are to be held definitively sets himself against the teaching of the Catholic Church.[new]”
“Canon 751 of the Code of Canon Law states that schism is “the refusal of submission to the supreme pontiff or of communion with the members of the Church subject to him.” Canon 1364 stipulates that the penalty for this crime is excommunication “latae sententiae,” i.e., automatically upon the commission of the offense.”
Furthermore, “Canon 188 §4 states that among the actions which automatically (ipso facto) cause any cleric to lose his office, even without any declaration on the part of a superior, is that of “defect[ing] publicly from the Catholic faith” (” A fide catholica publice defecerit“).
That is all the evidence one needs to officially declare Jorge Bergoglio, as a cardinal, defected from The Catholic Church, and was in a state of schism when he was elected to the Papacy. The fact that “those whose competence it is”, refuse to declare that Jorge Bergoglio was in a state of schism, despite the fact that he no longer affirmed The Unity Of The Holy Ghost, does not change the fact that Jorge Bergoglio had, in fact, defected from Christ’s Church.
In regards to heresy begetting heresy:
RORATE CÆLI: MAJOR STATEMENT: The Crimes and Heresies of Pope Francis, Their Causes and Effects, and the Action to Be Taken
It is important to note that the vote of every cardinal who was aware that prior to his election to the Papacy , Jorge Bergoglio had defected from The Catholic Faith, with full knowledge of his heresy, having ipso facto separated himself from Christ and His Church, has defected from The Catholic Church, making said vote null and void, due to said cardinal’s current state of schism
Only those whose competence it is , being Faithful to The Deposit Of Faith that Christ Has Entrusted To His One, Holy, Catholic, And Apostolic Church, for The Salvation Of Souls, can validly vote in a Papal Election, as only Faithful Cardinals have both the ability and desire to accept The MUNUS and thus The Office Of The Ministerial Office.
Obviously, we cannot , know for certain, which cardinals affirmed the heresy of cardinal Bergoglio, without asking each and every cardinal as well as Pope Leo XVI, whether or not Jorge Bergoglio, had ipso facto fell into heresy when he stated, “ If there is a union of a private nature, there is neither a third party, (No Holy Ghost), nor is society affected. Now, if the union is given the category of marriage, there could be children affected. Every person needs a male father and a female mother that can help shape their identity.”- Jorge Bergoglio public statement, demonstrating Jorge Bergoglio’s “refusal of submission to the supreme pontiff or of communion with the members of the Church subject to him“, was evident, prior to his election to the Papacy.
The proof of being a schismatic can be found in both The Deposit of Faith and Canon Law.
With respect, I think it is important to recall that no individual Catholic has the authority to declare a papal election invalid. The cardinals elected Francis according to the established norms, and from that moment he was pope. To deny this is to risk falling into a private judgment that places one above the Church.
That said, my own experience of his papacy was not simple or one-sided. At times I was deeply enthusiastic, at other times frankly angry. From the beginning to the end, however, I resolved myself to see him as he was: a man of good will, tireless, very human in the true sense of “flesh and blood.” He was complex in his simplicity and simple in his complexity, a personality unique and uncategorizable among modern popes. He never “played” the papacy as a role; he was a man of faith who became pope, and he signed himself simply Francis. His speech was unadorned, without frills, sometimes even blunt. For me, living under his pontificate was like undergoing a long Ignatian retreat.
One should also recognise his stature on the world stage. Politically and diplomatically, Francis was a giant—the most consequential since John XXIII. The war in Ukraine revealed this: while the Russian Patriarch aligned himself with a side, Francis refused to become the chaplain of the West. His role was not to bless blocs, but to call both sides back to dialogue, both personally and through envoys. That was a spiritual and political greatness worth acknowledging.
At the same time, Francis left us with unfinished business. He was too severe with traditionalists and too indulgent with modernists. The division between these camps is now a scandal, undermining Catholic credibility as a voice for peace. Pope Leo XIV will need urgently to heal this rift. Here lies part of Francis’s legacy: he leaves us the task of understanding his teaching rightly, while correcting its imbalances. He did make contributions in anthropology, morality, and even in raising awareness of spiritual combat; but he also left unresolved tensions.
In the wider context of Christian unity, Francis reminded us of universal human brotherhood. If we combine this with John Paul II’s insistence on recovering Europe’s Christian roots, the way forward becomes clearer: a return to the Church of Europe prior to the 1054 schism, in the spirit of Vatican II, and a relinquishing by Moscow of the pretension to be the “Third Rome.” Only thus can reconciliation between East and West advance.
For these reasons I cannot accept the notion of an “invalid papacy.” Francis’s pontificate was exceptional in both senses of the word: marked by strengths, weaknesses, and contradictions, yet undoubtedly real. Our duty now is neither to canonise him prematurely nor to demonise him, but to receive what was good, correct what was deficient, and move forward in continuity under Pope Leo XIV.
All Faithful Catholics can know through both Faith and reason, that Jorge Bergoglio’s statement regarding “private unions” is a denial of The Word Of God , as Christ Himself Has Revealed to His One, Holy, Catholic, And Apostolic Church, Through Sacred Tradition, Sacred Scripture, And The Teaching Of The Magisterium grounded in Sacred Tradition And Sacred Scripture, The Deposit Of Faith, in order to justify and “Bless” sexual unions that deny the Sanctity and Dignity of the marital act within The Sacrament Of Holy Matrimony, making it appear as if God, The Blessed Trinity, does not Call us to Holiness in all our relationships, including Marriage.
“I Know My Sheep, and My Sheep know Me.”- Jesus The Christ.
In fact, we can know through both Faith and reason, if the purpose of the synod on synods was to affirm The Deposit Of Faith, they would have no need to debate whether Christ’s teaching on Marriage and The Family was True, they would simply affirm The Deposit of Faith. Only members of a counterfeit church would claim that Christ Is not Divine and thus His teaching on Marriage And The Family is up for debate, and call this lie, which is not an affirmation of Catholic Doctrine, “a development “ of Catholic Doctrine, misrepresenting the words of John Henry Newman in order to justify their misrepresentation of The Word Of God, Jesus The Christ.
Truth and Meaning of Human Sexuality (December 8, 1995), and Preparation for the Sacrament of Marriage (May 13, 1996).
Family, marriage and “de facto” unions
Okay.
Thanks, Carl and Paul.
To defend Western Civilization, it helps to know its past. A massive 2-book set coming out this year is attempting to facilitate that: The Golden Thread by James Hankins and Allen Guelzo
Sandra, indeed, the appearance of this massive work by two fine scholars is something to look forward to very much.
The term “west” here is a bit problematic: Greece is essential to Western Civ, and Athens is not especially western; nor is Jerusalem. It would be one thing if the term was to distinguish European civilization from, say, Persian or Indian or Chinese, but that does not seem to be the intention. Either (a) we want to exclude the Slavs (sorry, Ukraine, you don’t make the club!), (b) we inherited from England the weird idea that being western makes us special (see Tolkien’s Valinor), or (c) both.
I get that Christendom was always more of an aspiration than a fact, but putting Christ at the center of one’s cultural identity still makes a lot more sense than basing it on longitude.
And, as far as that goes, I’ll take Rachmaninoff and Dvorak over any English composer, and Dostoevsky over any English novelist.
Will this ruling be a step to end The attack on Western Civilization by affirming the Sanctity and Dignity of human life?
https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/08/the-ten-commandments-and-a-secular-purpose/